Abstract

The peaking of the threat to the European Union integration through the Brexit
of June 2016 has some important lessons for Africa. We argue that the major
steps in African integration have been built from a European integration script.
Any major changes and transformations in the integration process in the EU
would give an easy prediction that there will be changes in a similar direction in
Africa as well. While Africa sees Europe as the best and only script that would
never fail, the refugee crisis and its corollary of terrorism threat (imagined or
real) and the financial crisis in Greece and other weaker economies earlier like
Portugal highlight fault lines. It shows that the script that Africa has been
following has some missing links. We thus argue further that a closer perusal of
the weaknesses in EU integration provides important lessons for Africa.
Therefore, Africa should also detach from following external scripts in its
development processes and develop its own peculiar functional and neofunctional
paths towards integration.